DAY 20

Woke up this morning to feel the wall next to my bed shaking violently. Guessed it was the wind which was blowing about 45mph yesterday and was supposed to pick up. Sure enough, filmed the night shifters for chatting during their break straight after my meagre breaky and the wind was up to 70 / 80 mph !!!!! Got some great actuality of them shooting the shit about the horrific conditions and our lead character Robbie saying he really doesn’t want to go up the derrick. (Don’t blame him – who would want to climb a 100ft steel tower in that! Plus he’s limping bad from a fall on metal.) Filmed them all getting garbed up in their mad max masks and goggles, and filmed a couple leaving the camp. Oh my god. There were eight feet snow drifts that had appeared over night. You couldn’t even see the rig with the exception of a couple of very dim lights, and its only 75m away. In fact you couldn’t see jack shit, except swirling spin drift everywhere. Trying to walk through it is an adventure all of its own, its such a white out that you keep stumbling and falling over snow drifts, your goggles iced over – take ‘em off and you have sideways ice flying into your eyes. Every bit of skin has to be covered – or you risk frost bite fast. At this wind speed (80mph) and temperature (-20 f) you get an ambient temp of around minus 70 odd – and that means frostbite. The worst thing is that although it feels cold to start, after a little while the pain goes and you may think it’s warmed up. Unless you’ve started actively warming it or getting circulation back to it, this actually means that the nerves have died. First it’ll go white, like a burn, and then if it’s really bad it’ll swell up huge, before going black and withering up and ultimately dropping off – although they tend to amputate. NASTY.

Very nearly lost my hat filming up on the rig, whizzed off and I had make a dash after it. Fortunately, it fell behind a building and out of the wind, otherwise it would have been gonner for good.

Although, it sounds harsh this is exactly what we needed to liven the program up. To get a proper character arc we need to see our central characters develop and this is usually represented by a down period of particular struggle and difficulty. They need to go through this so that they can rise to it and come out triumphant – so that they can develop on screen (even if they don’t in life!) I guess its kind of the middle – in the beginning-middle-and-end story line. Actually in film terms there must be a name for it and it probably comes later – like 2/3rds through. Think of Rocky being beaten, before intensive training montage and coming back against all the odds to win at the end.

Yes, our programs on this series are that cheesy. Quite tricky getting reality to dance to your tune, but if you film enough of anything and you’ve got a good editor you can make it look like whatever you like. (I don’t feel too bad doing this, because you know we’re gonna make em all look like heroes in the end.)

Today was great, our lead man started cussing and swearing at his bosses, threatening to quit and absolutely hating it – perfect for us.

Now all we need is the triumphant overcoming when he successfully climbs the derrick to fix the rig, and all his critics come round and congratulate him. We’ll see if we get it naturally otherwise we may have to induce it.

Well its official we've got a Phase 3 shut down. No one's allowed out of the camp for non essential work. The whole camp is rattling with the wind now, and its sounds like someones got a sledge hammer and is battering away outside my wall (the shutters are a bit loose.) Snow is piling up at the windows and doors so much so that, we can barely see or get out. (this makes it a little bit claustrophobic - could we actually just blow away?) but also exhilarating. Its best not to think about how all our lives are relying on a couple of tiniy generators - and god knows how much fuel they have !!!! cos nothing's coming in or out until this blizzard (80 mph + winds) stops.